A traveling exhibit at the High Desert Museum in Bend depicts an early 20th century Oregon lumber town with a difference: The company there employed both Black and white loggers.
The photographic exhibit from the Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center in Joseph, Oregon documents life the rural Wallowa County town of Maxville in the 1920s and ‘30s.
Hayley Brazier, the museum's Donald M. Kerr Curator of Natural History, told KLCC the Bowman-Hicks company hired workers from the south and midwest.
“Even though it was a segregated town, so there was a white school and Black school, and Black families were meant to live in a different part of town than the white families, the photographs tell a slightly different story," she said. "They show interracial friendships forming, people learning to live near each other and work together despite the segregation policies that were put in place by the lumber company.”
Brazier said the scenes captured in the photos are rare, not just in Oregon, but in the United States.
The museum added some physical items to the exhibit, including a doctor’s bag and medicine from the time period, as well as clothes washing and logging equipment, and things that would have been available at the general store.
According to Brazier, most residents left the community during the Great Depression and the town was abandoned by the early 1940s.
The exhibit is at the High Desert Museum until April 28.
At the end of the exhibit’s run, the museum will hold a conversation with Gwendolyn Trice, the daughter of one of the Black loggers from Maxville, and the founder and curator of the Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center. The event is April 25. Reservations are required, and space is limited.
